Melissa Smith

Melissa Tonkin is a Sydney-born Australian writer based in the Netherlands. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing, with a minor in Criminology, from Griffith University, and has been writing stories since childhood. Her work has appeared in an online satirical journal, including a short story inspired by Ted Kaczynski and the psychology of extremism, reflecting her longstanding interest in crime, psychology, and the nature-versus-nurture debate in criminal behaviour.

She has worked as a high school teacher of English and Drama, and as both a business editor and an academic editor of university theses. Having lived in Hong Kong, Dubai, and the Netherlands, she brings an international perspective to her fiction.

She is currently working on her first novel, The Pattern of Absence, a literary crime novel set between Australia and the Netherlands, weaving together dual timelines, buried family secrets, and a decades-old pattern of child disappearances.